I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat. —from Antonin Artaud’s “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society” (1947) Artaud died on this day in 1948, aged fifty-one. Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double, a collection of writings which included his influential manifesto-essay, “Theatre of Cruelty,” was published in 1938. His last decade was a difficult one, his drug addiction, cancer, and mental problems compromising and eventually overwhelming all work and hope. The stay in the insane asylum was triggered by a trip to Ireland in the summer of 1937 — this undertaken in the belief that his cane had once belonged to Saint Patrick (and before that, to Christ), and that its carved design was a coded message that the world would end on November 3rd — from which Artaud returned in a strait jacket. But he was not regarded as merely a madman: many attended benefit concerts on his behalf, and a year before his death his last major lecture-performance was sold out, for whatever reason. Among the six hundred in attendance were many notables — André Gide, André Breton, Arthur Adamov, Albert Camus. In a letter to a friend, Gide described the evening as if itself an apocalypse: Artaud’s lecture was more extraordinary than one could have supposed: it’s something which has never been heard before, never seen and which one will never again see. My memory of it is indelible—atrocious, painful, almost sublime at moments, revolting also and near-intolerable.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 13:13:00 +0000
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